6 ms·

Also: 1) Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard. 2) Why are

Also: 1) Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard. 2) Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same. 3) Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides. There are components that are common in all facets of our lives that when different can cause problems or surprise which could be good or bad. We need to join two floors of a building. Use stairs! People understand stairs. We need to showcase a collection of clickable images. Use a grid! People understand link grids. If you want to make your website usable you have to lean on expectations and those are pretty well defined nowadays. Imagine walking into a room and turning on the lights using a switch in the middle of the floor or plugging in your laptop's power cord at the top/back of the screen. Most companies spending money on a website want them to feel fresh and creative and engaging but they also have to temper that with usability and expectations. That's why all websites "look the same" or at least why the author thinks they do. Just because certain elements are in the same spot(s) or behave similarly doesn't mean things are the same. Or, at least, to me they aren't.

magduf 8y ago
You're confusing mass production with adoption of similar artistic concepts. Buildings have light switches and ceiling heights standardized because of building codes which mandate these things, and the fact that many components are mass produced so they're extremely cheap (like light switches) and are used everywhere. Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity. Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly. Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this. Basically, most of it is a cargo-cult mentality: sites update to "newer" designs that are less useful because it makes them look "fresh" and "modern" even though they waste a ton of whitespace and make the site slower and less useful. Sites used to be much better in the mid-2000s.
- pintxo 8y ago
  > Buildings have light switches and ceiling heights standardized because of building codes which mandate these things, and the fact that many components are mass produced so they're extremely cheap (like light switches) and are used everywhere. You mean similar to included youtube videos, Facebook like buttons, Google analytics, ... > Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity. GDPR cookie settings? Imprint? Privacy statements? > Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly. It would be silly to place the menu on the bottom, as you would always need to scroll down the whole page to see what options you have. > Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this. Houses may be built with the same components (bricks, wood, concrete, glas, metal), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go out in the world and look at all the different implementations. Sorry ;-)
  - r00dY 8y ago
    Menu on the bottom is obviously pointless, but sticky menu on the bottom would be so cool, most of the mobile apps moved to tabbar. Why it's not used extensively in web? (it would make it at least a tiny bit less boring). On iPhone when you scroll down the page, bottom Safari bar collapses and your sticky menu would be still sticky at the bottom. But clicking any button on the sticky bottom menu wouldn't invoke click on the menu. It would make iPhone Safari menu uncollapse -> huge confusion -> potentially less engagement -> retention. Web today is full of similar constraints. That's why there are usually one or two options that make sense and everything looks the same.
    - HereBeBeasties 8y ago
      Because on mobile the primary interaction point is your right (or left if you're a leftie) thumb, which naturally falls over a tab bar at the bottom of a screen. Whereas on the Web the primary click zone where your cursor focus is, is at the top of the browser window where the navigation elements are. There's also the obvious stuff about top-to-bottom reading order making such a layout making the navigation much more obvious when you first look at a site (which is probably want you want for most things, although not all, which is reflected in things like blogs often putting ancillary navigation elements in the page footer). I don't think this is a broken thing that needs fixing. I'll also note that it has taken mobile UX designers YEARS to start moving navigation elements to the bottom of their apps, driven by larger and larger screens making elements at the top of the screen quite uncomfortable for one handed use. It's required that to become sufficiently cumbersome that the trade-off in immediate discoverability becomes worth it. And you'll note that the most popular mobile apps such as WhatsApp still have all their navigation elements at the top, regardless.
omg_ketchup 8y ago
I'm actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever. Some flash sites were horrible. But there were some real gems. That Hacker News design by Tyrion's brother is probably inspired by a bunch of old Flash sites that followed that template. Flash was so easy to work with. Draw some neat stuff with their tools, animate it in the same program with their timeline, then make it all navigable and smart, still in the same program. You test it, in that same program. Then you publish it, and it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever. One file. So easy for artists, designers, and non-technical people. That's why we don't see cool shit on the web anymore- it's too hard/boring to make.
- rantanplan 8y ago
  Out of 100 sites in flash, maybe 2 were the gems you describe. The remaining 98 were utter crap that should die in a fire. The people who designed these gems would probably be able to design good sites no matter what tools they had at their disposal.
  - rch 8y ago
    Except in that the people paying the designers would demand sites like the 98 horrible ones.
  - happertiger 8y ago
    And you consider that different from the current generation of sites how? All kidding aside I think the overall level of USABILITY of websites is much higher than it ever has been today. But in large part that’s because they are all following the same foundations.
- tokyodude 8y ago
  I'm not disagreeing that flash was easier but are you sure it isn't just you got jaded? The things you though were cool 20 years ago in Flash just aren't as cool? I googled "cool websites" and these came up https://www.awwwards.com/95-inspiring-websites-of-web-design-agencies.html https://www.awwwards.com/95-inspiring-websites-of-web-design... don't know if any of those do anything for you. I'm too lazy to look for more but I feel like they are out there.
hwillis 8y ago
> Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard. You may not notice, but ceiling height varies regularly from 7.5 to ~10.25 feet, with absolutely everything in between represented. Only in a relatively small subset of large, wood-framed houses is it somewhat standarized to 10-and-a-bit feet. Lightswitches are crammed in wherever and are very often a case of "yeah, looks good." Often a contractor will have a height he has people put them in at, but it varies from person to person. 4' is the most common but there is no code for it like there is for walls or railings. Light switches themselves are all dictated by standardized form factors because different companies make the boxes, switches and faceplates and all need to agree on where the screws go for anything to work. Software, particularly web dev, is hardly limited by that. Design rigidity and similarity is dictated by convention, not necessity. > Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same. Those two are laws. However specific shapes, measurements and ratios like hood height, hood length/windsheild size, and body shape are all extremely similar in order to very aggressively optimize aerodynamics and crash/pedestrian safety. That's a reasonable comparison to web development: webpages are made to understood principles of UI and UX design, and well understood design patterns. > Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides. As an electrical engineer, I personally hate this uniformity. I hate the experience of laptops in general. I would very much like to make a laptop with no (well, one) moving parts, entirely glass, plastic and carbon fiber. The only moving part would be a single, extremely robust and stiff 180 degree hinge. Both sides of the clamshell are low-bezel 1440p touchscreens with localized tactile feedback, matte finish, and the keyboard and mousepad light up with a border wherever. Reconfigure the UI components with pinch and drag. Tilt the keyboard 45 degrees to type in bed. Use it like a book, a tablet, a newspaper, a laptop, whatever. Problems include typing fatigue, touch-typing, breaking the damn thing, battery life, yadda yadda. But someone could try something creative. Laptops are in a hellish halfway of standardized consumerism and unstandardized technology- so identical, but so unaccessable and so unexchangeable. So uncreative. Why are slow/fast chargers and external batteries so hard to find? Why is Microsoft making the most creative devices, like the surface? Ugh. Laptops suck.
- 8y ago
nine_k 8y ago
A closer example would be books. For ~500 years, books look approximately the same: normally paged sideways (not top-down), with some margins for handling, with text in rows or columns (depending on the writing system), some chapter structure, and index / contents page, page numbers, covers of more durable material to protect the pages, with some kind of a title on the top cover, etc. Those features don't just exist because of tradition or technical limitations. They mostly exist because they are convenient, useful, and logical. But they also exist because people expect them, from times of handwritten books. They put the skills people already had to good use. They created a visual language which is easy to pick up and easy to use, both for readers and typesetters. Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media. Forms have a much shorter, and much less rich history outside web, and here experimentation was wild; a lot of sites do forms quite differently. Though some common language (like labels, placeholder text, pre-validation, etc) already has formed. OTOH even checkboxes are not yet a commonly accepted visual concept; some e.g. prefer "switches", iOS-style.
- justrebooted 8y ago
  For books the content is the most important. It's a little different from websites where content isn't always the focus.
- mrob 8y ago
  Full justified text exists because of tradition. It makes the text harder to read because the word spacing becomes uneven, the line ends become harder to distinguish, and more words are broken by hyphens. But it's higher status because when all books were hand-written it took more skill to produce. Web sites have a similar popular anti-feature that's included for reasons of social status: low contrast text. I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens).
  - nine_k 8y ago
    I don't see why is this downvoted. This is quite valid. Fortunately extensions like Stylus allow to tweak page styles to make them more usable.
ASipos 8y ago
This reminds me of how disappointed I was in my adolescence by how all airports look the same. Only much later I realized that almost any kind of building has a common design and relies on familiarity and expectations in its potential inhabitants.
exodust 8y ago
> Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places... That's not true at all. Buildings are often very different from one to the other in both exterior design and internal layout. In my experience, even light switches in commercial buildings are often in very different spots to where you'd expect, relative to a normal residential house. This is partly due to lights being switched on from one central area, and not being something normal visitors or workers of the building need to use. These are fittings anyway, not "the building". Actual building architecture and interior design is very diverse, so your analogy here using buildings is not a good one to compare with the often identical website layouts seen everywhere.
agumonkey 8y ago
It's fun to see how <fields> start wild, people explore things as they feel. It's a jungle. Then <field> become a thing, optimization/laziness kicks in, people expect some concepts to be expressed in a certain way so they're predictable. No more jungle.

magduf 8y ago

You're confusing mass production with adoption of similar artistic concepts. Buildings have light switches and ceiling heights standardized because of building codes which mandate these things, and the fact that many components are mass produced so they're extremely cheap (like light switches) and are used everywhere. Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity. Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly. Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this. Basically, most of it is a cargo-cult mentality: sites update to "newer" designs that are less useful because it makes them look "fresh" and "modern" even though they waste a ton of whitespace and make the site slower and less useful. Sites used to be much better in the mid-2000s.

pintxo 8y ago
> Buildings have light switches and ceiling heights standardized because of building codes which mandate these things, and the fact that many components are mass produced so they're extremely cheap (like light switches) and are used everywhere. You mean similar to included youtube videos, Facebook like buttons, Google analytics, ... > Vehicles have things in the same places because regulations require it, it makes sense to do so (mirrors aren't much help if they're behind your head), and because drivers expect similarity. GDPR cookie settings? Imprint? Privacy statements? > Laptops are similar because that's really the only way to make them work. A keyboard over the monitor isn't usable: your arms would block your view. This is just silly. It would be silly to place the menu on the bottom, as you would always need to scroll down the whole page to see what options you have. > Websites may be built with the same components (python, PHP, web servers, HTML, CSS, etc.), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go to the Wayback machine and look at how sites used to look 15+ years ago, and compare to modern ones, to see this. Houses may be built with the same components (bricks, wood, concrete, glas, metal), but that in no way means they need to look the same. It's entirely possible to make them look very different, and you only have to go out in the world and look at all the different implementations. Sorry ;-)
- r00dY 8y ago
  Menu on the bottom is obviously pointless, but sticky menu on the bottom would be so cool, most of the mobile apps moved to tabbar. Why it's not used extensively in web? (it would make it at least a tiny bit less boring). On iPhone when you scroll down the page, bottom Safari bar collapses and your sticky menu would be still sticky at the bottom. But clicking any button on the sticky bottom menu wouldn't invoke click on the menu. It would make iPhone Safari menu uncollapse -> huge confusion -> potentially less engagement -> retention. Web today is full of similar constraints. That's why there are usually one or two options that make sense and everything looks the same.
  - HereBeBeasties 8y ago
    Because on mobile the primary interaction point is your right (or left if you're a leftie) thumb, which naturally falls over a tab bar at the bottom of a screen. Whereas on the Web the primary click zone where your cursor focus is, is at the top of the browser window where the navigation elements are. There's also the obvious stuff about top-to-bottom reading order making such a layout making the navigation much more obvious when you first look at a site (which is probably want you want for most things, although not all, which is reflected in things like blogs often putting ancillary navigation elements in the page footer). I don't think this is a broken thing that needs fixing. I'll also note that it has taken mobile UX designers YEARS to start moving navigation elements to the bottom of their apps, driven by larger and larger screens making elements at the top of the screen quite uncomfortable for one handed use. It's required that to become sufficiently cumbersome that the trade-off in immediate discoverability becomes worth it. And you'll note that the most popular mobile apps such as WhatsApp still have all their navigation elements at the top, regardless.

omg_ketchup 8y ago

I'm actually gonna have to go ahead and blame the demise of Flash for the current lack of interesting web design. I know there were technical reasons to get rid of it. Security. Mobile. Proprietary. etc. Whatever. Some flash sites were horrible. But there were some real gems. That Hacker News design by Tyrion's brother is probably inspired by a bunch of old Flash sites that followed that template. Flash was so easy to work with. Draw some neat stuff with their tools, animate it in the same program with their timeline, then make it all navigable and smart, still in the same program. You test it, in that same program. Then you publish it, and it works exactly how you made it work, in every browser, ever. One file. So easy for artists, designers, and non-technical people. That's why we don't see cool shit on the web anymore- it's too hard/boring to make.

rantanplan 8y ago
Out of 100 sites in flash, maybe 2 were the gems you describe. The remaining 98 were utter crap that should die in a fire. The people who designed these gems would probably be able to design good sites no matter what tools they had at their disposal.
- rch 8y ago
  Except in that the people paying the designers would demand sites like the 98 horrible ones.
- happertiger 8y ago
  And you consider that different from the current generation of sites how? All kidding aside I think the overall level of USABILITY of websites is much higher than it ever has been today. But in large part that’s because they are all following the same foundations.
tokyodude 8y ago
I'm not disagreeing that flash was easier but are you sure it isn't just you got jaded? The things you though were cool 20 years ago in Flash just aren't as cool? I googled "cool websites" and these came up https://www.awwwards.com/95-inspiring-websites-of-web-design-agencies.html https://www.awwwards.com/95-inspiring-websites-of-web-design... don't know if any of those do anything for you. I'm too lazy to look for more but I feel like they are out there.

hwillis 8y ago

> Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places and the space between the floor and ceiling is pretty standard. You may not notice, but ceiling height varies regularly from 7.5 to ~10.25 feet, with absolutely everything in between represented. Only in a relatively small subset of large, wood-framed houses is it somewhat standarized to 10-and-a-bit feet. Lightswitches are crammed in wherever and are very often a case of "yeah, looks good." Often a contractor will have a height he has people put them in at, but it varies from person to person. 4' is the most common but there is no code for it like there is for walls or railings. Light switches themselves are all dictated by standardized form factors because different companies make the boxes, switches and faceplates and all need to agree on where the screws go for anything to work. Software, particularly web dev, is hardly limited by that. Design rigidity and similarity is dictated by convention, not necessity. > Why are all vehicles the same? Mirrors are always in the same spots and seat belts all work the same. Those two are laws. However specific shapes, measurements and ratios like hood height, hood length/windsheild size, and body shape are all extremely similar in order to very aggressively optimize aerodynamics and crash/pedestrian safety. That's a reasonable comparison to web development: webpages are made to understood principles of UI and UX design, and well understood design patterns. > Why are all laptops the same? Keyboard center on the bottom with a trackpad or nub near the center. Screen on top, ports and stuff on the sides. As an electrical engineer, I personally hate this uniformity. I hate the experience of laptops in general. I would very much like to make a laptop with no (well, one) moving parts, entirely glass, plastic and carbon fiber. The only moving part would be a single, extremely robust and stiff 180 degree hinge. Both sides of the clamshell are low-bezel 1440p touchscreens with localized tactile feedback, matte finish, and the keyboard and mousepad light up with a border wherever. Reconfigure the UI components with pinch and drag. Tilt the keyboard 45 degrees to type in bed. Use it like a book, a tablet, a newspaper, a laptop, whatever. Problems include typing fatigue, touch-typing, breaking the damn thing, battery life, yadda yadda. But someone could try something creative. Laptops are in a hellish halfway of standardized consumerism and unstandardized technology- so identical, but so unaccessable and so unexchangeable. So uncreative. Why are slow/fast chargers and external batteries so hard to find? Why is Microsoft making the most creative devices, like the surface? Ugh. Laptops suck.

8y ago

nine_k 8y ago

A closer example would be books. For ~500 years, books look approximately the same: normally paged sideways (not top-down), with some margins for handling, with text in rows or columns (depending on the writing system), some chapter structure, and index / contents page, page numbers, covers of more durable material to protect the pages, with some kind of a title on the top cover, etc. Those features don't just exist because of tradition or technical limitations. They mostly exist because they are convenient, useful, and logical. But they also exist because people expect them, from times of handwritten books. They put the skills people already had to good use. They created a visual language which is easy to pick up and easy to use, both for readers and typesetters. Most web sites are a logical continuation of books, magazines, newspapers, etc. No wonder they actively adopt the time-proven, well-working concepts from the print media. Forms have a much shorter, and much less rich history outside web, and here experimentation was wild; a lot of sites do forms quite differently. Though some common language (like labels, placeholder text, pre-validation, etc) already has formed. OTOH even checkboxes are not yet a commonly accepted visual concept; some e.g. prefer "switches", iOS-style.

justrebooted 8y ago
For books the content is the most important. It's a little different from websites where content isn't always the focus.
mrob 8y ago
Full justified text exists because of tradition. It makes the text harder to read because the word spacing becomes uneven, the line ends become harder to distinguish, and more words are broken by hyphens. But it's higher status because when all books were hand-written it took more skill to produce. Web sites have a similar popular anti-feature that's included for reasons of social status: low contrast text. I think this is popular because ability to easily read it signals both health (good eyes) and wealth (good screens).
- nine_k 8y ago
  I don't see why is this downvoted. This is quite valid. Fortunately extensions like Stylus allow to tweak page styles to make them more usable.

ASipos 8y ago

This reminds me of how disappointed I was in my adolescence by how all airports look the same. Only much later I realized that almost any kind of building has a common design and relies on familiarity and expectations in its potential inhabitants.

exodust 8y ago

> Why are all buildings the same? Light switches are often in similar places... That's not true at all. Buildings are often very different from one to the other in both exterior design and internal layout. In my experience, even light switches in commercial buildings are often in very different spots to where you'd expect, relative to a normal residential house. This is partly due to lights being switched on from one central area, and not being something normal visitors or workers of the building need to use. These are fittings anyway, not "the building". Actual building architecture and interior design is very diverse, so your analogy here using buildings is not a good one to compare with the often identical website layouts seen everywhere.

agumonkey 8y ago

It's fun to see how <fields> start wild, people explore things as they feel. It's a jungle. Then <field> become a thing, optimization/laziness kicks in, people expect some concepts to be expressed in a certain way so they're predictable. No more jungle.